That's just fucking great. Can we please begin a search for yet another charismatic, wise, heavy drinking, multi-culturalist, having a keen eye for truth, dirt dog chef with witticisms unmatched to explore the world in my stead? You will be missed my friend. You will be missed. I live in Massachusetts. Anthony got his start working for restaurants in Provincetown, a refuge for queers for a long time. He once served me pizza and had a wise ass comment because I was wearing a Smiths t-shirt from the meat is murder album, yet ordering something with meat on it. Can't remember our exchange but I admired his gaul for pointing out my hypocrisy. Damn. At least the Kardashians is still on.

Harvey Weinstein allegedly hired an “army of spies”, including former Mossad agents, in an attempt to stop accusers from going public with sexual misconduct claims against him, according to .

Among the private security agencies hired by Weinstein starting around autumn 2016, the magazine claims, was Black Cube, which is largely run by former officers of Israeli intelligence agencies, including . Another was corporate intelligence giant Kroll.

The report, published on 6 November, alleges that two Black Cube investigators met with actor Rose McGowan, who later , to obtain information.

Weinstein “unequivocally denies” all claims of non-consensual sex, a spokesperson for the producer says.

The New Yorker also claims that one of the investigators secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan while pretending to be a women’s rights advocates, citing dozens of pages of documents and seven people directly involved in Weinstein’s efforts.

The investigator reportedly used a different fake identity to meet a New York magazine journalist who was investigating allegations made against Weinstein. She also allegedly attempted to broker a meeting with , the New Yorker journalist who reported made against Weinstein last month, and also wrote the 6 November investigation.

Weinstein and the private investigators also used journalists to extract details from women who were making claims against the film producer, according to the magazine.

During his yearlong effort, Weinstein and his team are accused of collecting information on dozens of people, compiling psychological profiles with their personal or sexual histories in order to contradict, discredit or intimidate his targets.

The New Yorker reports that Weinstein sought the assistance of ex-employees from his movie enterprises to help collect names and place calls. Investigations also allegedly sometimes went through Weinstein’s lawyers. Among them, the New Yorker claims, was David Boies, who represented Al Gore in his 2000 presidential election dispute with George W Bush.

The New Yorker claims Boies had signed a contract demanding that Black Cube seek to uncover information to stop the publication of a New York Times story about Weinstein’s sexual abuse when his firm was also representing the Times in a libel case. Boies told the magazine “it was a mistake” to have been involved with the investigators.

Weinstein’s spokeswoman Sallie Hofmeister dismissed the report, saying: “It is a fiction to suggest that any individuals were targeted or suppressed at any time.”

The New York Times called Boies’ alleged behaviour “inexcusable” and said it would be “pursuing appropriate remedies”.

“We learned today that the law firm of Boies Schiller and Flexner secretly worked to stop our reporting on Harvey Weinstein at the same time as the firm’s lawyers were representing us in other matters,” the paper said in a statement. “We consider this intolerable conduct, a grave betrayal of trust, and a breach of the basic professional standards that all lawyers are required to observe.”

Following the publication of the New Yorker report, McGowan praised Farrow for his investigation, tweeting: “Ronan Farrow your words will line the halls of justice.” Meanwhile, another person alleged to have been spied on, actor Asia Argento, described the revelations as terrifying, : “Why didn’t I, @rosemcgowan, @RoArquette [Rosanna Arquette] @AnnabellSciorra spoke [sic] up earlier? We were followed by ex-Mossad agents. Isn’t that terrifying? Very.”

The latest allegations against Weinstein came as the Television Academy, responsible for the Emmy awards, announced it had expelled Weinstein for life. The move follows similar actions by the and the .

“The Academy supports those speaking out against harassment in all forms and stands behind those who have been affected by this issue,” a spokesperson for the Television Academy told Variety, adding that it was reviewing the organisation’s code of conduct.

“We are determined to play a role in protecting all television professionals from predatory harassment, ensuring they are able to practice their craft in a safe environment.”

Police in London, Los Angeles and New York have launched investigations into the alleged behaviour by Weinstein, who has been accused of sexual assault and harassment by more than 90 women.

"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

As linked by elfismiles above, he's the 2nd VIP to be found hanging this week. On Tuesday, Kate Spade, fashion designer........

Spade’s longtime friend Elyce Arons told The New York Times this week that when the subject of celebrity suicides came up in their discussions about Spade’s depression, her friend assured her, “‘I would never do that. I would never do that. I would never do that.’ And I believed her.”

That Kissinger quote by Bourdain certainly caught my attention... Clearly a man with a moral compass and a big-ass megaphone. Also, a likeable CHEF with no clear political agenda, so his political messages could conceivably penetrate where more overt and blatant sermonizing would just be disregarded.

-I don't like hoodlums.-That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.

Good to see you again Bruce, and that’s a very interesting point that I somehow hadn’t considered. As if we were seeing each other at a funeral, I’ll say I wished it could have been under better circumstances.

I am happy to see that we as a society are slowly moving past the phrase “committed suicide.”

The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler

Never thought I could be so affected by the death of a celebrity who I don't even personally know. Devastating. My first idea was to delete his shows from my hard drive and return his books to the library, since it would be impossible for me to watch or read them, but I gave up on that.

Obviously it is in the best interests of sanity to accept this and move on, to try and use his statements about depression and death to piece together the apparently spontaneous decision. I am not holding onto any false hope here, any glimmer of a saving grace that would actually prevent one from confronting death head on (as this is an obvious imperative moment for those who cared about him to look at mortality and life.)

OK, all that being said - it does still seem suspicious. No suicide note yet? That is out of character for him, but then again he has humorously expressed a spontaneous desire to die on multiple occasions in the past, including on episode shoots with Eric Ripert...

“I’ll go back, see my daughter, unpack, repack, mimic a normal life, which is extraordinarily pleasurable to me,” says the star, who also further complicates his hectic travel schedule by planning trips to Rome to visit his girlfriend, actress Asia Argento, between shoots. “I really love doing laundry. When I go home, putting my laundry in the machine and then hearing the dryer going around, that’s very comforting to me.”

Though that doesn’t mean Bourdain is ready to put away his passport (he’s on his 12th) and retire to one of the nearly 100 countries he’s visited anytime soon. “I gave up on that. I’ve tried. I just think I’m just too nervous, neurotic, driven,” he says. “I would have had a different answer a few years ago. I might have deluded myself into thinking that I’d be happy in a hammock or gardening. But no, I’m quite sure I can’t. I’m going to pretty much die in the saddle.”

That very recently aired episode acknowledging the Armenian genocide committed by Turkey made him some enemies. As seen here:

Anthony Bourdain has traveled the world with his cooking show, "Parts Unknown."

But top officials in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich country nestled between Russia and Iran, want him to know this: He just became a persona non grata.

His crime? Traveling to Nagorno-Karabakh, an extremely contentious pocket of land that is located, technically, in Azerbaijan. But right now, it's controlled by Armenia. The enclave is about the size of Delaware, and it has been a sore spot between the two countries since 1988, when the region's legislature voted to join Armenia. (It did so because many of the region's residents are ethnic Armenians.)

Azerbaijan rejected the secession attempt. But after the Soviet Union fell, the region's legislature declared independence outright. In 1992, a full-scale war broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Armenia quickly gained the upper hand, seizing control of Nagorno and pushing even farther into Azerbaijan.

By 1993, Armenia controlled nearly a fifth of Azerbaijan. Hundreds of thousands of Azeris were displaced. (Today, there are about a million internally displaced people in Azerbaijan.) In 1994, Russia brokered a a cease-fire. All told, nearly 25,000 people died during the conflict. Many of those deaths were gruesome. As a reporter for the Independent explained, "By the time I was covering the Karabakh war in the early 1990s, Armenian militia bands were murdering Azeri villagers in massacres eerily similar - though on a smaller scale - to those which occurred during Turkey's genocide of the Armenian people in 1915."

Today, more than a decade later, peace between the two countries is fragile, at best. Earlier this year, fighting broke out along the border, sparking fears that a full-scale political crisis was in the offing. And it's hard to imagine a solution anytime soon. As the Council on Foreign Relations explained last year:

"One obstacle to peace is the issue of sequencing. All three sides - Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh - refuse to budge until the others make a concession: Azerbaijan wants Armenia to end its occupation first and withdraw its forces before discussing the republic's final status; Armenia is seeking a resolution first on the status question before pulling out its forces; Nagorno-Karabakh wants its independence officially recognized prior to all other negotiations."

Azerbaijan makes it very difficult for its citizens to visit Nagorno-Karabakh. Visiting without permission from the government in Baku is considered a criminal offense. And Azerbaijan's officials make it very hard for people to reenter the country once they have gone to Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan maintains a list - with more than 700 names - of people from all over the world who are no longer welcome. The list includes government officials, European Union members, journalists and activists.

This week, one more name was added. Bourdain "has been put onto the persona non grata list for his disrespect of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity and sovereignty," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hikmet Hajiyev told Agence France-Presse. "Filming a food show on Azerbaijan's occupied territory is an insult to one million Azerbaijani refugees who were forcefully expelled from their homes.

One in eight Cambodians as many as 2 million people were killed during the Khmer Rouge's campaign to eradicate their country's history. One out of every 250 Cambodians is missing a limb, crippled by one of the thousands and thousands of land mines still waiting to be stepped on in the country's roads, fields, forests, and irrigation ditches. Destabilized, bombed, invaded, forced into slave labor, murdered by the thousands, the Cambodians must have been relieved when the Vietnamese, Cambodia's historical archenemy, invaded.

One look at the abject squalor of the capital city's crumbling and unpaved streets and any thought that Cambodia might be fun flew out the window. If you're a previously unemployable ex-convenience store clerk from Leeds or Tulsa, however, a guy with no conscience and no chance of ever knowing the love of an unintoxicated woman, then Cambodia can be a paradise. You can get a job as an English teacher for about seven dollars an hour (which makes you one of the richest people in the country). Weed, smack, whores, guns, and prescription drugs are cheap and easy to find. You can behave as badly as you wish. Shy boys on motorbikes will ferry you from bar to bar, waiting outside while you drink yourself into a stupor. You can eat dinner, then penetrate indentured underaged prostitutes, buy a kilo of not very good weed, drink yourself stuttering drunk, and be driven safely home to your spacious apartment all for under thirty dollars. Cambodia is a dream come true for international losers a beautiful but badly beaten woman, staked out on an anthill for every predator in the world to do with what he wishes.

Phnom Penh's total population when the Khmer Rouge finished marching its citizens out into the countryside to dig irrigation ditches and executing most of them was a mind-boggling twelve people. That's down from about 850,000 only a couple of years earlier. Most of the survivors returned to the city, to find their former homes in shambles; looted, waterless, powerless hovels, often occupied by equally desperate squatters. Armless, legless, limping, and crawling locals struggle still to scratch out a living making handicrafts for tourists. Or begging. The average wage in Cambodia is under a dollar a day. Four-year old children wander the markets, begging, carrying their two-year-old brothers.

Where does one go in Phnom Penh? Just where you'd think the expats would go: The FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club), where you can have an American-style hamburger, and a cold beer, then retire to the rear balcony to watch the bats leaving the eaves of the National Museum at dusk a nightly event where a stream of thousands and thousands of bats curls out and up into the purple-and-gold sky like fast-moving smoke. Then you can stumble into the street, where a crowd of skinny, underweight boys on scooters and motos wait, no doubt calling your name as they know you and your predilections by now brush by a few amputees, hop on the back of one of the boys' motos, and head off to 'the Heart', local shorthand for the Heart of Darkness Bar. After that, there are the nightclubs and brothels (a narrow distinction between the two), maybe some pizza seasoned with ganja, a bag of smack for a nightcap. With any luck, your Cambodian-made condom won't snap, you won't get rousted or shot at by the cops, and you won't run into any relatives of Hun Sen, the prime minister any of which might lead to tragedy. If you do get into trouble, don't look to the law to help you out.

A story from the Phnom Penh Post Phnom Penh Post:

Tha Sokha, 19, tried for the rape of a six-year-old girl, will serve only six months in jail for indecent assault because the rape of his victim 'was not deep enough' said Kandal Court Judge Kong Kouy . . . After initially ignoring the girl's family's complaints against Sokha, district police brokered a compensation deal between the families of the victim and the perpetrator. The girl's parents thumbprinted a contract in which they would receive 1.5 million riel in compensation for the rape of their daughter, but they never received the money. Upon taking the case to the commune police station on Jan. 11, the victim and her sister reported receiving death threats from a commune police officer named Lon if they continued to 'talk about rape.'

Another typical story from the Phnom Penh Post Phnom Penh Post same day as the above: same day as the above:

Acid Mutilation a Misdemeanor: The first case of a viciously mutilated acid attack victim pressing charges against her assailant has shocked legal observers by resulting in a two-year suspended sentence against the suspect. Kampong Cham Municipal Court Judge Tith Sothy dismissed a petition to upgrade the charges . . . Sothy justified the ruling on the grounds that [the perpetrator] had no intention of killing the victim but only sought to 'damage her beauty because of jealousy.'

Getting the picture? So who is in charge? Hard to say. The easy answer is Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouge officer who defected to the Vietnamese and then was 'elected' prime minister, ousting his nominal competition by coup d'etat. There's King Sihanouk, back again, installed in the palace after playing footsie with the United States, the Khmer Rouge, the Chinese and everybody else. He provides a thin veneer of legitimacy and tradition to what is essentially a military dictatorship. There are the remnants of the Khmer Rouge and its allies a loosely knit coalition of convenience among various unlovely private armies, organized criminals, former Vietnamese stooges, and extremist groups. The Khmer Rouge 'defected' to the 'central government' (such as it is), awhile back, in return for amnesty, and was basically given control of its former stronghold and cash cow in northern Cambodia, free to pursue its traditional pastimes of gem smuggling and lumbering and its new gambling ventures. Those in the Khmer Rouge were given central government uniforms when they put down their guns, which means that nearly every male Cambodian of draft age, it seems, wears the same fatigues in one form or another, making it difficult to tell exactly who is robbing and extorting you on any given day. There are the much-feared private armies (everybody's got one), which act mainly as security for various despotic scuzzballs and their relatives with attendant hit men making it a dangerous matter if some drunken lout steps on your toe in a nightclub and you voice your displeasure too expressively.

Driving out by the airport one afternoon, my cabdriver pulled his car over suddenly, as did everyone else on the road. A police escort whipped by, sirens screaming, followed in short order by a spanking new black Humvee with tinted windows.

'Hun Sen nephew,' said my driver with distaste. Hun Sen's family and friends are the subject of frequent stories of drunken beatings, stabbings, and pistol-whippings, when one of them gets cranky during an evening out in the discos. There's a famous tale of the time one business associate arrived at Pochentong Airport on a commercial airliner. Told that the airline had misplaced his luggage, he is said to have disembarked, procured a gun from a waiting flunky, then begun shooting out the airplane's tires until his belongings were recovered. Needless to say, this behavior did not result in arrest.

Shooting things, if you have enough money in your pocket, is perfectly all right in Cambodia. Drinks are free at the Gun Club. Ammunition, however, you pay for by the clip.

The well-known American chef, author of books, traveler and host of the TV series "Parts Unknown" Anthony Bourdain committed suicide.

He was 61 years old.

According to CNN, Bourdain was in France working on an upcoming episode of his CNN series "Parts Unknown." His close friend Eric Ripert, the French chef, found Bourdain unresponsive in his hotel room Friday morning.

Last October, Bourdain visited Armenia and occupied Karabakh. For the visit to occupied Karabakh he was blacklisted by the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan.

In addition to the fact that in the program the Azerbaijani and Georgian dishes were presented as Armenian, the presenter called Karabakh "Artsakh" and tasted allegedly "Armenian Khash" in Dilijan, "Armenian khinkali" in Karabakh and "Armenian dolma" in Yerevan.

Lavash was also presented as "national Armenian bread".

Among other things, the topic of the fictional "Armenian genocide" was touched upon during the program.

Holland's Queen Maxima, her husband and three children lay her 33-year-old sister to rest at emotional funeral, after tragic hanging suicide Ines Zorreguieta committed suicide after suffering from depression and was found dead in her apartment Queen Maxima, who is Argentinian, arrived for the funeral with husband and their three daughters Zorreguieta had a close relationship with her sister and was the godmother to 11-year-old Princess ArianeBy Tariq Tahir For MailonlinePublished: 20:09 EDT, 8 June 2018 | Updated: 02:33 EDT, 9 June 2018 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... icide.html

^^^Wonder if there were other rx's (esp. psychotropic) Bourdain & Spade were taking.

Rise in U.S. suicides highlights need for new depression drugs

Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A spike in suicide rates in the United States has cast fresh light on the need for more effective treatments for major depression, with researchers saying it is a tricky development area that has largely been abandoned by big pharmaceutical companies.

U.S. health authorities said on Thursday that there had been a sharp rise in suicide rates across the country since the beginning of the century and called for a comprehensive approach to addressing depression. The report was issued the same week as the high-profile suicides of celebrities Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade. Reuters was not able to determine if either Bourdain or Spade were getting drug treatment.

Kate Spade’s husband Andy Spade said in a statement this week that she had suffered from depression for many years and was working closely with her doctors. A representative for Andy Spade said he had no further comment on Saturday. A representative for Bourdain could not immediately be reached for comment.

With the availability of numerous cheap generic antidepressants, many of which offer only marginal benefit, developing medicines for depression is a tough sell.

Drugmakers have 140 therapies in development targeting mental health issues, including 39 aimed at depression, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America trade group. That compares with the industry’s work on some 1,100 experimental cancer drugs, which can command some of the highest prices.

“Psychiatry has become a disfavored area for investment,” said Harry Tracy, whose newsletter NeuroPerspective tracks developments in drug treatments for psychiatric problems. “Insurers say ‘why should we pay more for a new treatment?’”

Some say anti-depressant drugs take too long to become effective, if they are effective at all.

About half of people with depression fail to respond to current therapies, said Dr. Husseini Manji, global head of neuroscience at Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N)’s Janssen unit.

Developing antidepressants is risky. Patients in clinical trials often show a big placebo response, masking the efficacy of the drug being tested. In addition, once approved, antidepressants require a large sales force to reach psychiatrists as well as primary care providers.

^^^What a novel concept, more drugs, as a fix (even better, develop a vaccine).

J&J’s esketamine targets treatment-resistant depression. It is similar to ketamine, which is used as an anesthetic and to relieve pain, and often abused as a recreational party drug with the street nickname Special K.

Similar? One viewpoint:

They’re not interested in ketamine because the patent expired.

They’ll never spend the millions it takes to get it approved for depression or other psychiatric disorders because it went generic.

What big drug companies can do, and are doing, is making a very small change in the structure of generic ketamine that they can patent. And by patenting it, they can own it for years, fund studies, push for FDA approval for different indications or conditions … like depression … or suicidal thinking … and enjoy the profits that pour in.